The Analysis Of The Grotesque Characteristics In Flannery O’connor’s Novel Wise Blood

Abstract

Literature must be always interesting; it must have a structure and an aesthetic purpose, a total coherence and effect, and it must stand in recognizable relation to life (Rene Wellek, 1956: 212). Literature must give the readers pleasure and knowledge, and can add their intellectual. In literature, we can find three genres. One of the literary genre, prose, is often classified into some other forms, such as novel, romance, short story, and biography. The novel, as Richard Taylor says in his book Understanding the Element of Litarature (1981: 46), is the modern or living form of narrative fiction which often shares constructional features, subject matter and themes derived from the epic, romance, allegory and satire, it remains distinctively separates from them. One sub-form of novel, gothic is very popular from the 1760s onwards until the 1820s. Gothic has had a considerable influence on fiction since (still apparent in the 1990s) and is of much importance in the evolution of the ghost story and the horror story. Most Gothic novels are prose forms that contain horror stories or tales of mystery, intended to chill the spine and curdle the blood. As a subgenre of Gothic style, Southern Gothic could be considered as a style of writing practiced by many writers of the American South whose stories set in that region are characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents (http://en wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Gothic). Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot Universitas